For a variety of reasons, a user may subscribe to multiple data feeds. For example, traders in the financial community often subscribe to different market data feeds in order to receive news relevant to trading decisions. One perceived advantage of doing so is that the trader may gain a wider perspective by analyzing news from different sources and thus improve the trader's performance.
Consequently, when a major event occurs, a network data delivery device, e.g., a switch or a router, often receives a significant increase in network traffic. Because different traders often subscribe to the same event, a multicast delivery method is frequently used. In contrast to unicast delivery methods, which when used to deliver to multiple recipients sends a duplicate of the data stream from the sender to each recipient; multicast delivery method generates only a single data stream and utilizes a multicast-enabled system, e.g., a router, to duplicate data at the multicast-enabled system and forward duplicated data streams to receivers.
Thus, because duplication occurs at the multicast-enabled system instead of at the sender, efficiency is improved. However, when a major event occurs, a data stream may be duplicated hundreds or thousands of times at the multicast-enabled system. In some situations, the outgoing data stream may overload the egress system port buffers and cause data packets to be dropped, which in turn may adversely affect a downstream end-user's application program, such as causing a desktop trading application program, to crash or malfunction.